Robert Bresson | Le diable problement (The Devil, Probably) / 1977

witnesses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter and director) Le diable problement (The Devil, Probably) / 1977

 

Often described as Bresson's most controversial of films, Le diable probalement (The Devil, Probably) today seems almost prophetic, and, unless one is willing to close his eyes upon the environmental and social issues concerns the movie presents—and unfortunately, we all know individuals who fit that definition—there is little of real controversy in the work. The four young individuals at the center of Bresson's work sit through documentaries, lectures, and other presentations on subjects such as global warming, the effects of the atomic bomb and atomic energy, the overfishing of the world's oceans, and numerous other still-hot topics that seem as central to our world today as they obviously appeared to these young French drop-outs of the late 1960s.

      Perhaps what people mean by describing the great film director's work as controversial derives from his forceful and unwavering statement of these young people's correct evaluation of  a world gone crazy in its greedy search for quick expedients and money. Bresson does not leave anything to doubt as to his position, utterly mocking the university professor who, in describing the advantages of atomic energy, for example, keeps suggesting that "eventually" the problems of using such energy will be solved by vague military and corporate forces in the United States! As Charles summarizes it: "To reassure people, you only have to deny the facts." 

    From the very first scene to the final images of the film, Bresson makes it quite clear that, even though his androgynous hero chooses the solution of suicide to cure his illness of "seeing too clearly," his commitment is to life.  But then Bresson's heroes, from Mouchette and the Country Priest to his compulsive pickpocket, all choose routes to salvation that might be damned by their faith. That is the way it is with such a great deep moralist as Bresson: for individuals faced with the evils of the world, probably the work of the Devil, there is no easy decision in knowing how to survive and react.

 

    Much like a kind of hippie cult leader, Charles (Antonie Monnier) collects a small group of people around him—Edwige (Laetita Carcano) and Alberte (Tina Irissari) as well as the drug addict Valentin (Nocolas Deguy) and Edwige's former boyfriend, Michel (Henri de Maublanc)—as they undergo a series of what might be described as educational explorations of the decline of contemporary society. Unlike some cult leaders, he asks only that, with him, they witness discussions of the societal problems. In return he offers each of them a deep love—which we observe most intensely when Valentin is desperately in need of a fix and suffers withdrawal symptoms, Bresson showing Charles not only obtaining the drugs but gently pulling the covers around his suffering friend. At one point, Charles even offers to marry the more needy of his two women friends.

     Yet Bresson hardly ever sentimentalizes his figures, and the characters here are also kept at a kind of emotional distance through the director's fragmentation of their bodies—as in nearly all of his films, his characters' acts are often recounted in the movements of hands, arms, legs, and feet, instead of head-on face shots—and through the effect that sounds—music, footsteps, voices, sirens, etc.—have upon his actors' psyches. These cinematographic devices give the viewer the sense of sharing their lives since we observe them so very closely, while at the same time releasing us from an objective viewpoint. We are encouraged to mentally and physically share in their daily experiences. And so too do we, then, become witnesses of and participants in the world they are forced to evaluate.

     It is almost inevitable, we come to see, that the sensitive Charles should chose to commit suicide; certainly his friends fear for it. But as he tells his psychiatrist, he does not really want to die; it is simply that in such a world he cannot sanely go on living. Like the Romans, accordingly, Charles chooses another—in this case, his drug-needy friend—to carry out his wishes. Always in need of a quick fix and the money to find one, Valentin agrees to become Charles' Judas, carrying out the awful deed only too well, shooting and killing his loving friend mid-sentence, as if to cut off any possibility of regret or his friend's ability to talk his way out of the end he has determined for himself.  In his suicide-murder, Charles is also, probably, a kind of devil, but at least he has been saved from seeing, like Cassandra, everything he has predicted come true. Whereas, unfortunately, we must now daily face just those horrors which Charles and his friends already witnessed, as well as facing all those still in denial today.

 

Los Angeles, May 19, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (June 2012).

Susumu Hani | 初恋・地獄篇 (Hatsukoi Jigokuhem) (Nanami: The Inferno of First Love / 1968, USA 1969

cabbages and onions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Susumu Hani and Shūji Terayama (screenplay), Susumu Hani (director) 初恋・地獄篇 (Hatsukoi Jigokuhem) (Nanami: The Inferno of First Love) / 1968, USA 1969

 

Susumu Hani’s film, seldom seen in the US, begins with a young couple, Nanami (Kuniko Ishii) and Shun (Akio Takahashi), meeting at a Tokyo hotel dedicated to sex. They have clearly rented the small room for their encounter, having apparently met elsewhere. It is also obvious that this is their first meeting, and that the young male, Shun, particularly, is totally inexperienced, as Nanami quickly undresses and helps him to feel comfortable. For a great part of this lovely encounter, the couple kiss and merely giggle, exploring, bit by bit, one another’s bodies. Yet the encounter ends somewhat uneasily as it becomes clear that Shun is unable to engage in sex; yet even then, both turn the event into something positive as they begin to tell each other their life stories, Shun revealing that he has been abandoned, as a little boy, by his mother who, after his father’s death, has taken up with a boxer. Adopted by a couple, dubbed by others as the “good Samaritans,” Shun learns, through his father, how to become a metalworker.

 

     Nanami has come to the city in order to work in a shoe factory, but unable to make a reasonable living, the good-looking girl gradually becomes a nude model, working in a kind of brothel-like setting, where men seek her out for photographs. Yet for all the possible exploitation of her job, she admits that she has gotten used to it and that her customers are, for the most part, good to her.

     The audience for this film, accordingly, might expect from the rest of the film, subtitled “The Inferno of First Love,” a story of a poignant love-affair, a blossoming of a relationship between the two that characterizes both the heart-break and delights of first loves. Although Nanami and Shun agree to meet again, however, that meeting never takes place, and what follows, in the context of the simple portrayal of youthful love we have just witnessed, is startling. It may help one to know that when this film first appeared in the US it was paired, at least in New York City, with the porn classic Deep Throat at the World 49th Street Theater, a fact seemingly unimaginable given the scene I have just described.

     Indeed, director Hani moves the story carefully forward in two directions, with an almost idyllic portrayal of the young hero’s encounter with a female toddler in a park, whom he has described as his only other girlfriend to Nanami. The child, who accidentally has encountered the boy, is obviously delighted with his gentle ways and his willingness to play games with her and read to her. At the game of riddles, the child stumps him with her question that entails the difference between cabbages and onions: if when you peal a cabbage you are left with the core, what are you left with after peeling an onion? The utterly clueless boy cannot answer.

     Although the boy’s and the child’s friendship obviously is completely innocent, we sense something amiss about his willingness to devote so much time to her company. There is quite clearly something a bit stunted about his behavior. But, at first, we dismiss this, particularly when Hani also serves up a long scene where the boy and his stepfather sit in the older man’s studio both rhythmically tapping against pieces of metal, a perfect example, so it seems, of a loving elder and his appreciative apprentice.

     Soon, however, as Hani begins to expand his tale, sending Shun out in the world in an attempt to reencounter the carefree Nanami, the viewer begins to sense another world lying underneath this pleasant presentation of innocence and adaptation. Witnessing Nanami and her companions as they position themselves on the street, very much like prostitutes, Shun follows them as a peeping voyeur, through a series of sordid encounters. These begin fairly innocently, with a photo shoot of her and her friends in swimming suits that gradually are stripped away to reveal the girls’ nude nubile bodies. The man she describes to Shun, Ankokuji (Minoru Yusasa) pays her and brings her gifts. But later, when a Yakuza member bribes a shoeshop owner to use his basement, he and his “photo club” friends turn Nanami and her friends into would-be actresses who play out S&M fantasies between lesbian couples and simulated violent battles between Samurai-like women (played by Nanami) and a large Caucasian amazon, the plot becoming increasingly bizarre—and more and more violent—as the men, sweat pouring from their testosterone-charged bodies frantically snap photographs of the heated encounters between the women and whisper stories of previous performers of such chain, whip, and snuff films. The large, amazed eyes of Shun, secretly witnessing this perverse drama, expresses, perhaps, not only his amazement but serves as a kind of moral statement of what, we too, have just observed. In a matter of just a few moments, the director has taken us from simple nudity to enactments of sado-masochistic scenes, racial stereotypes, sacrilegious ceremonies, and ritualized murders. 

    Another scene portrays Shun, again in the park with his young toddler-friend, but this time intimating a much more pedophiliac relationship as he holds her close as she urinates. Observed by park bystanders, who assume the gestures represent acts, he is chased from the park, attacked and arrested, ending up in an equally perverse psychiatric session where he is hypnotized, injected with sodium pentothal, and forced to remember not only those recent dramatic events, but his own early sodomizing by his “saintly” adoptive father, his adoptive mother crying out for a stop to the procedures.

     Despite these clearly torrid aspects of both of their lives, the young couple still attempt to make a date, but as Nanami is more and more enveloped in the pornographic world in which she is involved, Shun—clearly in need of alternatives to his own haunted memories—becomes jealous as he is forced to follow her into greater and greater degrees of degradation. An innocent meeting with a fellow classmate, a nerdy boy from her schooldays she has nicknamed Algebra, is transformed into a kind of torture for Shun as he tags along with the two, attending a graduation ceremony at a school where both he and Nanami are made fun of for their obviously outré clothing and behavior.

    Yet, here again, Hani surprises the viewer by transforming Algebra’s sentimentalized and badly done film about his own “first love” into something that Shun suddenly perceives as a meaningful work of art, a movie which has found significance in his own life; as the two share their mutual admiration of Algebra’s clumsy expression, Nanami, presented by Shun with the child’s riddle, easily solves it: what you get by peeling an onion is tears.

     Both, indeed, must face further pain and humiliation before they can even possibly embrace the new world they promise one another. On a day-time shoot at the beach, Nanami observes, from afar, her polite businessman photographer who has showered her with gifts joyfully spending a day with his wife (whom he has described as someone he desires to beat) and his two young boys, barbecuing fish. Never before has she observed the man so enjoying himself.

 

   Shun, in a kind of surrealist-like series of dream images calls up what seem to be scenes from his childhood, where naked boys and girls are dressed in Kabuki masks, gathered and chased by the taunts of adults as in some vague ritualistic celebration. Shun awakens to again have to face the homosexual affections of his stepfather; rejecting his advances for the first time, the boy is ordered out of the house, the man predicting Shun will become a delinquent!

      No matter, he is on his way to the hotel to meet his “first” and only love, Nanami. But along the way he encounters the Yakuza and his thugs, who attempt to pay him to reveal Nanami’s address. Running from them in absolute horror—and in terror perhaps of all his memories present and past—he is struck by a car and killed. Nanami, upon hearing the commotion, comes to the hotel window to observe her potential lover’s body below.

     Combining the radical opposing genres of a love story, an idyll, a surrealist nightmare, a 1960s documentary, and a naturalistic parable, Nanami: The Inferno of First Love, is just what its subtitle suggests, a recounting of a hellish-like furnace where lives are determined less by desire and will than they are by all the little hits and taps that mold any malleable being into something he or she would prefer not to have become.

 

Los Angeles, May 14, 2012

Nagisa Ōshima | 新宿泥棒日記 Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) / 1968

feeling dizzy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Masao Adachi, Nagisa Ōshima, Mamoru Sasaki, and Teakeshi Tamura (screenplay); Nagisa Ōshima (director) 新宿泥棒日記  Shinjuku dorobō nikki  (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) / 1968

 

No one might logically argue that Nagisa Ōshima’s Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) is uninteresting; if anything, this kaleidoscopic piece of cinema is overlaid with so many expressions of its central themes of revolution and sexual freedom that it becomes almost muddled and murky in its complexity. Although there certainly are numerous “oppositions” portrayed in Diary, one might more precisely characterize its structure as being based as a series of contradictions or structural reversals: the bookstore employee, Umeko Suzuki (Rie Yokoyama) who arrests the book thief Birdey Hilltop (Japanese pop artist Tadanori Yokoo) and turns him in to the head of the Kinokuniya bookstore (played by the chain’s president, essayist Moichi Tanabe) later herself becomes a thief, experiencing what Birdey describes as a sexual orgasm while stealing what she describes  as a kind of intellectual orgasm of words, each stolen piled-up book broadcasting the revolutionary words within. Later, after being scolded for having even brought the thief in for punishment, we discover that she is not even an employee but has used the occasion to develop a relationship with the boy.

     Even that relationship between this young woman and boy is quickly reversed as we come perceive Birdey as a slightly effeminate, passive mate to the possibly lesbian and certainly more sexually dominate Umeko.

     The disheveled man seemingly being chased by attackers is, in fact, the real Japanese folk singer, Juro Kara, who. in fact, is performing a stunt with his fellow players to advertise his street theater group, and several times throughout the film performing his folk songs while dressed in his underwear and a white thong.

 

     The campy, transvestite-dominated street versions of Kabuki theater of Juro Kara’s company have more political force than the several documentations of student protests and demonstrations we are shown throughout. Sex is replaced by ritual, ritual transformed into naturalistic encounters. Even the dominant black-and-white images of Ōshima’s film are, in several instances, reversed into brightly lit color clips. Nothing, in short, is what it pretends to be in Diary of a Shihjuku Thief; from the very first instant of the work, time is destroyed, the hands of the clock stolen, yet throughout the film we are reminded, again and again, of the exact time, not only in Tokyo, but throughout the world. What pretends to be a “diary” is an outpouring of unnaturalistic scenes; the thief of the title bears the gift of freedom to all he encounters.   

     One might even question whether this “film” is what it claims to be, a series of narrative images: for much of the narrative is buried in symbolic stances and performances; characters become masked figures performing contradictory roles; dialogue and conversation is replaced by written text.

     Critic David Phelps has argued, rather incoherently I feel, that Diary is a work wherein everyone desires to control; contrarily, I’d suggest that it is a work in which nearly everyone gives up any sense of ability to predetermine or dominate events.  Ōshima’s work, ultimately, is less a piece about revolutionary acts and stances, as it is itself a shape-shifting beast that wrests power from any one theatrical, literary, or cinematic form. Written words talk. Moving images are slowed down to become static friezes or tableaux vivants; theatrical gestures become moving realistic acts, such as the Umeko’s final smear of her menstrual blood across her mid-riff. All things we might define as “real” become fantasy, fantasies turn into coarse realities.

     Yet for all that, I can’t truly pronounce this pastiche as a successful work of art. Like a jewel-studded sabre—or better yet, putting it in context, like an overwrought, drug-induced hippie art poster—Diary of a Shihjuku Thief seems too embellished, too preoccupied with its own layered illusions to emotionally involve and affect its viewers’ lives. While Ōshima has certainly summarized the tone and feelings of the latter half of the 1960’s decade, it leaves us with a sense of being simply confounded. And while that puzzlement is, perhaps, just what one might have expected from an historical perspective of an era of such contradictions, I felt dizzier as I left the theater than I felt freed or personally liberated. But then even living through 1960s I felt the same thing nearly every day. So it may be that Ōshima accomplished just what he had set out to do. Such self-congratulatory justifications, however, all too often lay behind that decade’s rhetoric, which I have always felt revealed the deep failure of that decade's exhilaration.

 

Los Angeles, May 15, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2012).

 

 

Gary Halvorson and David McVicar | Il Trovatore / 2009

sparks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (music) and Salvador Commarano (libretto), David McVicar (director), Gary Halvorson (film director)  Il Trovatore / 2009 [The Metropolitan HD-Live production]

 

My seeing Verdi's operatic warhorse Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera had more to do with contingency than with choice (it was the only production I could see during the few days of my stay in the city). But as with many of my activities it now seems, in the context of the concerns of My Year 2009, appropriate. Like so many of the essays of this year, the plot of Verdi's opera is also about "facing the heat," the characters having to endure the punishments for their own present errors and judgment as well as the sins of their ancestors of the past.

     In this case, the gypsy woman Azucena's mother has been burned at the stake for "bewitching" an infant in her care, the current Count di Luna's infant brother. To avenge her mother's death, Azucena kidnapped the young boy and threw him into the flames that burned her mother to death. Only the charred remains of a baby were discovered on the pyre, and since that day the Count has sought out the murderer with the intention of confirmation or further revenge.

     Meanwhile, the Count has fallen desperately in love with a young woman serving his wife in the court. The woman, Leonora, meanwhile, is smitten with wandering troubadour, Manrico, who also happens to be the leader of the partisan rebel forces threatening the Count's rule—who is, incidentally, Azucena's son. Discovered in Leonora's presence, Manrico is challenged by the Count to a duel, a fight unto death. Manrico quickly overpowers the Count, but strangely resists murdering him. He releases the Count. The war between the two forces continues, with the Royalist forces winning, and resulting in Manrico's near-death. He lives only because he has been dragged from the battlefield by his mother and nursed by her back to health.

      In the gypsy camp the gypsies sing of their tireless work, their spirits raised only by the site of a pretty woman, the famed anvil chorus, performed in this production as an almost sexual assertion of masculinity. Indeed, the strikes of the hammers upon the anvil sent almost real sparks into the audience, and certainly Verdi's joyous chestnut does foretell of the fire of the past and of the future.

     For, as almost anyone can foretell from the brief and somewhat absurd plot spelled out above, Manrico is doomed in his love for Leonora. Azucena is captured near the camp and is held captive in di Luna's castle, and when Manrico's army is defeated, he too joins his mother within the cells of the castle.

    Leonora escapes, returning to the castle and promising herself up to di Luna if he will release his prisoners. Di Luna agrees to release Manrico, and Leonora rushes to tell him. Manrico, however, is outraged at what he believes to be her betrayal of their love. Leonora, having planned all along to cheat di Luna of her presence, has taken a poison which acts faster than she has expected, and she dies in Manrico's arms. Di Luna, witnessing the death, sends Manrico to his execution, while Azucena reveals the truth: mistakenly she had thrown her own son onto the pyre and, accordingly, Manrico is di Luna's long-sought brother. Her revenge has at last been accomplished.

  

   Yet, despite these facts, Il Trovatore is not really a revenge tragedy but a story of four failed human beings who all come together in the "Moon Count's" castle (di Luna), creating a kind of lunatic world. The three commit unspeakable acts and the fourth is apparently incompetent. Azucena has been so caught up in revenge that she has, "accidentally"—a nearly unthinkable word in the context—murdered her own son, and although she has been a loving mother to Manrico, we nonetheless must recognize her as a reprehensible being. The Count, for his part, is also caught up in the past, becoming so determined to find his brother's killer that he destroys the sibling in the act. The count is courting, moreover, a woman who is an intimate of his wife. Manrico, the troubadour, is a terrible warrior, unwilling even to kill a brutal enemy in a duel; more importantly, he is a soldier who loses all battles in which he participates. He is not even a good "troubadour"—a devotee of courtly love—attacking Leonora at the very moment that she has sacrificed her own life for him. Leonora, in turn, enacts a suicide that saves neither her lover nor his gypsy mother. The fires within each of them, fueled by love, envy, anger, and hate, sparks each other's inevitable destruction.

     The production I saw at the Met, with Hasmik Papian as Leonora, Želijo Lucic as the Count, Marco Berti as Manrico, and Mzia Nioradze as Azucena was a superb rendition of this opera, with Papian (better known for her Norma) and Niordze as standouts for their performances.

 

New York, May 9, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2009).

Gary Halvorson and Otto Schenk | Don Pasquale / 2010 [The Metropolitan HD-Live production]

 cleaning house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gaetano Donizetti (composer), Giovanni Ruffini (libretto, based on a libretto by Angelo Anelli), Otto Schenk (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Don Pasquale / 2010 [The Metropolitan HD-Live production]

 

A funny thing happened on my way to this opera. I had planned on my New York trip to attend the opera the day it was being broadcast live via high-definition video so that Howard could see the same production back in Los Angeles as I sat in the theater. He might even spot me the audience as the camera scanned it. The irony is that he would have a much better view of the entire opera, plus backstage interviews that are often entertaining, while I sat in a high balcony seat squinting down at the small figures upon the stage. He would also hear it, sung into microphones at the edge of the stage, far better than I could from my vantage.

     While I was in New York, I stayed with Sherry Bernstein, my poet friend Charles Bernstein's mother, whom I told of my plans. On Central Park West, her apartment is only a few blocks from the opera house. Oddly enough, Sherry also planned to attend, not at the Met but, just like Howard, at a live video showing in some movie theater.

     Donizetti's comic opera is based very much on the stock figures of commedia dell'arte, so perhaps one need not be too serious about the ridiculous characters or the plot, which basically boils down to an attempt by two outsiders, Dr. Malesta (Mariusz Kwiecien) and his sister Norina (Anna Nerebko), to teach an old man, Don Pasquale (John Del Carlo), a lesson about life. Don Pasquale's young nephew Ernesto (Matthew Polenzani), in love with Norina, refuses to marry the woman his uncle feels is more appropriate. In reaction, Don Pasquale, on a suggestion from his doctor, Malesta, decides to marry Norina (pretending to be convent girl, Sofrina) instead, disinheriting Ernesto. There is little else to the plot: the two are falsely married and Norina moves in, completely making over the house and her own wardrobe from top to bottom, as she prepares to head off to the theater without her new husband. Ultimately, the miserly Don Pasquale is so put-out—literally of his own life and house—that he is relieved upon discovering he has been duped, and is happy to hand over Norina to his nephew, while agreeing to restore his inheritance.

     This silly story makes for many delightful moments, including Norina's truly comical "See, I am ready with love to surround him," and the servants' hilarious confusion in Act II and III, along with Norina's "Bring the jewels at once."

     Yet I cannot help asking why this brother and sister team are so intent on teaching the old Don Pasquale a lesson, all for the sake of the rather meek and incompetent Ernesto? Norina is such a wicked flirt and liar that we can hardly understand her love for a boy so shocked by the announcement of Don Pasquale's marriage, he is ready to leave home and inheritance behind. Obviously, the two, brother and sister, do have something at stake. By pretending to marry Don Pasquale, the penniless Norina comes into great wealth, part of which most certainly will go, at the old man's death, to her lover.

     But given her huge deceptions, even if they all turn out for the best, one has to wonder whether she will make such a poor boob a good wife. It’s clear that Ernesto is even more able to be hood-winked than his uncle. 

     By the time of the finale, "Heaven, what do you say?" there is actually little to be said. The heaven that has been invoked is one in which Norina has metaphorically cleaned the house of both men, who previously lived in a barren, cobweb-encrusted manor (at least in the Met production) existing, similarly, in lives basically empty and unused. I guess the question is, will Norina return the jewels or wear them to the theater each night?

 

New York, November 15, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2011).

Alfred Hitchcock | Blackmail / 1929

things that cannot be said

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfred Hitchcock and Ben W. Levy (screenplay, based on a play by Charles Bennett), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Blackmail / 1929

 

Although he was certainly fascinated with the macabre, with sinister characters out to rob, maim, and kill their victims, and was highly suspicious of most institutions, local, federal, and international, one might easily argue that Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most morally predictable directors in Hollywood. If innocents in his film are often accused and tortured for wrongs they did not commit, and villains come close to going scot-free, in the end moral order is restored: the truth is not only revealed but it prevails, even if harm and danger has changed those wrongly suspected and accused. If his heroes suffer, they almost always are redeemed. Even the lovely heroine of Dial M for Murder is saved from the gallows at the very last moment by the bumbling police inspector. On the other hand, the alluring heroine of Vertigo must die because of her involvement in a murder. Perhaps only the murder of the escaping secretary of Psycho seems unjust—although, we must admit that, having robbed her boss, she is not a true innocent. And even though it first appears that an entire community has unintentionally conspired to do in Harry in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, the doctor later confirms that the real cause of death as a heart attack, and, more importantly, Harry’s death brings that community together in ways that redeem nearly everyone’s lives. We never meet the innocent strangled in Rope, but the murderers are finally brought to justice. There are no instances that I can immediately think of in mature Hitchcock works where the villain completely escapes punishment.

      It is fascinating, accordingly, that Hitchcock’s first “talkie,” Blackmail, the true murderer, Alice White (Anny Ondra), protected in a cover-up by her boyfriend, Detective Frank Webster (John Longden), escapes punishment, while an innocent, if unlikeable petty thief and blackmailer, Tracy (Donald Calthrop) is deemed guilty and killed in the police chase. Indeed, walking away from the New Scotland Yard the guilty couple of Blackmail even break out in laughter—laughs of relief rather than utter villainy, and not so very different with the tense laughter they shared earlier in the film—which seems even more immoral, in some respects, than Alice’s original crime. 

      For Alice has murdered only to protect herself, and the man she stabs, Mr. Crewe (Cyril Ritchard)—a sleazy effete artist—is attempting to rape her. So perhaps she might never have been brought to trial. Yet she and Frank attempt to cover up the truth. Even here Hitchcock redeems her, in part, by having her, of her own free will, visit Scotland Yard in order to confess, and that act presumably reveals her moral fiber. But the fact remains that she has caused the deaths of, now, two men, and justice has not never served.

     The problem with the world of Blackmail is one of expression, or, rather, the lack of it. Although many unpleasant things are talked about, particularly by the endless gossip the visiting neighbor (Phyllis Konstam) who is quite willing to talk about murder and knives, many more important things cannot and do not get said. In part, the problem is that the film was first to have been a silent film, but Hitchcock, recognizing the potentialities of the new “talkie” version of filmmaking, shot the film as both a silent film and a talkie.

     The first scene, with only accompanying music, wherein the police, getting a lead, race to arrest a hiding criminal, explains very little about his guilt, showing only that he must be guilty since he has a gun laying nearby and is picked out by a woman in a line-up. Soon after, we see the detectives, washing up in the Scotland Yard bathroom, participating in their own kind of petty gossip, one of their kind complaining that his tailor was so bad that he has never picked up the fabric he purchased in an attempt to refuse to pay the tailor.

      Alice is fuming in an outer office because Frank has been late, and as they walk to a nearby teahouse they are mostly silent, she still angry for his lateness. At the tearoom they are hardly able to find a table, and when they do it is nearly impossible to get the attentions of the waitress. Alice, we quickly perceive, has other reasons why she is angry with her boyfriend, including the fact that she has apparently flirted with another man, making an appointment with him in that very room. And she soon lies to Frank, skipping out on their planned movie date to meet up with the man, the artist Crewe.

     Frank, miffed, storms out in anger, but once out of the teahouse he has a change of heart, and seems determined to return to his lover. Before he can take action, however, she reappears with Crewe, and he perceives that she is “cheating” on him.

 

     In short, everyone seems to be keeping secrets from each other, refusing to speak out and discuss their desires and priorities. Although Alice clearly thinks of herself as a modern, free-thinking woman (Crewe even teases her about her attitude by singing “Miss-Up-to-Date”), she is still a relative neophyte in the sexual world, an innocent who accepts Crewe’s invitation to see his studio more as a dare than as a tacit approval of his later sexual nuances. Naively, she even allows him to undress her, so that she might pose for him in the guise of a ballerina.

     Although Crewe presents the aura of being a successful artist, his art, obviously filled with operatic and balletic images, is kitsch and artsy in uninteresting ways, his most recent painting representing a kind of brutish Pagliacci, for whom the later blackmailer Tracy has apparently been the model. Indeed, there are hints—nothing gets openly said—that Crewe himself is being blackmailed or least pestered for money by his former model. We never find out why Tracy is bothering the artist and, apparently, even stalking him, but we certainly suspect some nefarious relationship, perhaps even of a homosexual nature. Again, Hitchcock and his characters seem unable to speak out in this film, being torn, it appears, between speaking and silence.

     Once the crime is committed, Alice enters what might almost be described as a state of distraction, and she is virtually unable, even to speak, let alone explain the situation to herself or anyone else. Is it any wonder that Alice becomes fixated on one word only, “knife?” 

     Tracy approaches the two, having discovered Alice’s other glove, with such an oiliness— hardly daring to speak the word blackmail—that the terrified couple are forced to even serve him breakfast at Alice’s parents’ table. And throughout the long scene where he finally makes his demands known and a deal is struck, their conversation is constantly interrupted. Words are separated from sentences, with other words introduced without context. Meaning is attenuated.

     Even after Frank hears from his superiors that the blackmailer has suddenly become a suspect in the murder, we are still uncertain whether he is attempting to frighten Tracey away from any further blackmail or speaking the truth as he supposedly awaits the police van to arrest the vagabond.

     In this film in which characters cannot speak their minds, it is highly ironic that Tracey escapes into The British Museum, the bastion of images, objects, and documents that detail the history of the world. That he slips into the dome itself, falling to his death in the very center of this bastion to knowledge, without even quite knowing why he is on the run, speaks volumes—but once again keeps the truth in abeyance.

     When Alice does attempt to admit her crime, no one will let her speak; and when she finally admits her actions to Frank, himself, she still cannot bring herself to even say the words “He tried to rape me,” explaining that Crewe was attempting to do something terrible to her.

      The Pagliacci painting, finally, becomes an emblem of not only Frank’s having been nearly cuckooed, but of Alice’s guilt in the entire affair—something, evidently, that provokes, like the sad clown himself, only laughter. It is the painting, not language, that gets the final say in this portrait of a world that cannot speak of so many things.     

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).